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New York, NY (June 4, 2015) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced today that Robert Zemeckis's The Walk will make its World Premiere as the Opening Night selection of the upcoming 53rd New York Film Festival (September 25 – October 11), which will kick off at Alice Tully Hall. A true story, the film is based on Philippe Petit’s memoir To Reach the Clouds and stars Golden Globe nominee Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit, the French high-wire artist who achieved the feat of walking between the Twin Towers in 1974. The Walk will be the second 3D feature selected for the Opening Night Gala since Ang Lee’s Life of Pi in 2012 and also marks Zemeckis’s return to the Festival after Flight, the 2012 Closing Night Gala selection. Today’s announcement coincides with the release of the film’s trailer, which can be viewed at movies.yahoo.com. The film will be released in 3D and IMAX 3D on October 2, 2015. [See the rest of the press release on the FSLC website here.]

We are pleased to announce the World Premiere of Don Cheadle's directorial debut, Miles Ahead, as the Closing Night selection for the 53rd New York Film Festival. In the film, Cheadle, who also co-wrote the script, stars as the legendary Miles Davis opposite Emayatzy Corinealdi and Ewan McGregor. This announcement marks the second World Premiere film slated for this year's NYFF, running September 25 – October 11, along with Robert Zemeckis' The Walk, set for Opening Night.

New York Film Festival Director and Selection Committee Chair Kent Jones said: “I admire Don’s film because of all the intelligent decisions he’s made about how to deal with Miles, but I was moved—deeply moved—by Miles Ahead for other reasons. Don knows, as an actor, a writer, a director, and a lover of Miles’ music, that intelligent decisions and well-planned strategies only get you so far, that finally it’s your own commitment and attention to every moment and every detail that brings a movie to life. ‘There is no longer much else but ourselves, in the place given us,’ wrote the poet Robert Creeley. ‘To make that present, and actual … is not an embarrassment, but love.’ That’s the core of art. Miles Davis knew it, and Don Cheadle knows it.”

Don Cheadle added: “I am happy that the selection committee saw fit to invite us to the dance. It’s very gratifying that all the hard work that went into the making of this film, from every person on the team, has brought us here. Miles’ music is all-encompassing, forward-leaning, and expansive. He changed the game time after time, and New York is really where it all took off for him. Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center... feels very ‘right place, right time.’ Very exciting.”

Miles Davis was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. And how do you make a movie about him? You get to know the man inside and out and then you reveal him in full, which is exactly what Don Cheadle does as a director, a writer, and an actor with this remarkable portrait of Davis, refracted through his crazy days in the late-70s. Holed up in his Manhattan apartment, wracked with pain from a variety of ailments and fiending for the next check from his record company, dodging sycophants and industry executives, he is haunted by memories of old glories and humiliations and of his years with his great love Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi). Every second of Cheadle's cinematic mosaic is passionately engaged with its subject: this is, truly, one of the finest films ever made about the life of an artist. With Ewan McGregor as Dave Brill, the "reporter" who cons his way into Miles' apartment. The film was produced by Don Cheadle, Pamela Hirsch, Lenore Zerman. Along with Daniel Wagner, Robert Barnum, Vince Willburn and Daryl Porter.

2015 NYFF opening night delayed to September 26 to accommodate the Pope's visit to New York.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced today that the World Premiere of Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk will take place on Saturday, September 26 instead of Friday, September 25 due to Pope Francis’s upcoming visit to New York. The date change was made for logistical and security reasons. The film, which remains the Opening Night selection of the 53rd New York Film Festival (September 25 – October 11), will screen at Alice Tully Hall. Festival dates stay the same, with free NYFF programming to be offered on Friday, September 25, prior to the Opening Night screening on Saturday, September 26.

Additional NYFF special events, documentary section, and filmmaker conversations and panels, as well as NYFF’s Projections and the full Convergence programs, will be announced in subsequent days and weeks.

The 17-day New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema, featuring top films from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. The selection committee, chaired by Jones, also includes Dennis Lim, FSLC Director of Programming; Marian Masone, FSLC Senior Programming Advisor; Gavin Smith, Editor-in-Chief, Film Comment; and Amy Taubin, Contributing Editor, Film Comment and Sight & Sound.

Films & Descriptions

Opening Night
The Walk
Robert Zemeckis, USA, 2015, 3-D DCP, 100m
Robert Zemeckis’s magical and enthralling new film, the story of Philippe Petit (winningly played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and his walk between the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, plays like a heist movie in the grand tradition of Rififi and Bob le flambeur. Zemeckis takes us through every detail—the stakeouts, the acquisition of equipment, the elaborate planning and rehearsing that it took to get Petit, his crew of raucous cohorts, and hundreds of pounds of rigging to the top of what was then the world’s tallest building. When Petit steps out on his wire, The Walk, a technical marvel and perfect 3-D re-creation of Lower Manhattan in the 1970s, shifts into another heart-stopping gear, and Zemeckis and his hero transport us into pure sublimity. With Ben Kingsley as Petit’s mentor. A Sony Pictures release. World Premiere

Centerpiece
Steve Jobs
Danny Boyle, USA, 2015, DCP, TBC
Anyone going to this provocative and wildly entertaining film expecting a straight biopic of Steve Jobs is in for a shock. Working from Walter Isaacson’s biography, writer Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network, Charlie Wilson’s War) and director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours) joined forces to create this dynamically character-driven portrait of the brilliant man at the epicenter of the digital revolution, weaving the multiple threads of their protagonist’s life into three daringly extended backstage scenes, as he prepares to launch the first Macintosh, the NeXT work station and the iMac. We get a dazzlingly executed cross-hatched portrait of a complex and contradictory man, set against the changing fortunes and circumstances of the home-computer industry and the ascendancy of branding, of products, and of oneself. The stellar cast includes Michael Fassbender in the title role, Kate Winslet as Joanna Hoffman, Seth Rogen as Steve Wozniak, Jeff Daniels as John Sculley, Katherine Waterston as Chrisann Brennan and Michael Stuhlbarg as Andy Hertzfeld. A Universal Pictures release. [See the Telluride ("preview") review for Variety by Justin Chang.]

Closing Night
Miles Ahead
Don Cheadle, USA, 2015, DCP, 100m
Miles Davis was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. And how do you make a movie about him? You get to know the man inside and out and then you reveal him in full, which is exactly what Don Cheadle does as a director, a writer, and an actor with this remarkable portrait of Davis, refracted through his crazy days in the late-70s. Holed up in his Manhattan apartment, wracked with pain from a variety of ailments and sweating for the next check from his record company, dodging sycophants and industry executives, he is haunted by memories of old glories and humiliations and of his years with his great love Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi). Every second of Cheadle’s cinematic mosaic is passionately engaged with its subject: this is, truly, one of the finest films ever made about the life of an artist. With Ewan McGregor as Dave Brill, the “reporter” who cons his way into Miles’ apartment. A Sony Pictures Classics release. World Premiere

Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One
Miguel Gomes, Portugal/France/Germany/Switzerland, 2015, DCP, 125m
Portuguese with English subtitles
An up-to-the minute rethinking of what it means to make a political film today, Miguel Gomes’s shape-shifting paean to the art of storytelling strives for what its opening titles call “a fictional form from facts.” Working for a full year with a team of journalists who sent dispatches from all over the country during Portugal’s recent plunge into austerity, Gomes (Tabu, NYFF50) turns actual events into the stuff of fable, and channels it all through the mellifluous voice of Scheherazade (Crista Alfaiate), the mythic queen of the classic folktale. Volume 1 alone tries on more narrative devices than most filmmakers attempt in a lifetime, mingling documentary material about unemployment and local elections with visions of exploding whales and talking cockerels. It is hard to imagine a more generous or radical approach to these troubled times, one that honors its fantasy life as fully as its hard realities. A Kino Lorber release. U.S. Premiere

Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One
Miguel Gomes, Portugal/France/Germany/Switzerland, 2015, DCP, 131m
Portuguese with English subtitles
In keeping with its subtitle, the middle section of Miguel Gomes’s monumental yet light-footed magnum opus shifts into a more subdued and melancholic register. But within each of these three tales, framed as the wild imaginings of the Arabian queen Scheherazade and adapted from recent real-life events in Portugal, there are surprises and digressions aplenty. In the first, a deadpan neo-Western of sorts, an escaped murderer becomes a local hero for dodging the authorities. The second deals with the theft of 13 cows, as told through a Brechtian open-air courtroom drama in which the testimonies become increasingly absurd. Finally, a Maltese poodle shuttles between various owners in a tear-jerking collective portrait of a tower block’s morose residents. Attesting to the power of fiction to generate its own reality, the film treats its fantasy dimension as a license for directness, a path to a more meaningful truth. A Kino Lorber release. U.S. Premiere

Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One
Miguel Gomes, Portugal/France/Germany/Switzerland, 2015, DCP, 125m
Portuguese with English subtitles
Miguel Gomes’s sui generis epic concludes with arguably its most eccentric—and most enthralling—installment. Scheherazade escapes the king for an interlude of freedom in Old Baghdad, envisioned here as a sunny Mediterranean archipelago complete with hippies and break-dancers. After her eventual return to her palatial confines comes the most lovingly protracted of all the stories in Arabian Nights, a documentary chronicle of Lisbon-area bird trappers preparing their prized finches for birdsong competitions. Right to the end, Gomes’s film balances the leisurely art of the tall tale with a sense of deadline urgency—a reminder that for Scheherazade, and perhaps for us all, stories can be a matter of life and death. A Kino Lorber release. U.S. Premiere

The Assassin
Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan/China/Hong Kong, 2015, DCP, 105m
Mandarin with English subtitles
A wuxia like no other, The Assassin is set in the waning years of the Tang Dynasty [later ninth century] when provincial rulers are challenging the power of royal court. Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi), who was exiled as a child so that her betrothed could make a more politically advantageous match, has been trained as an assassin for hire. Her mission is to destroy her former financé (Chang Chen). But worry not about the plot, which is as old as the jagged mountains and deep forests that bear witness to the cycles of power and as elusive as the mists that surround them. Hou’s art is in the telling. The film is immersive and ephemeral, sensuous and spare, and as gloriously beautiful in its candle-lit sumptuous red and gold decor as Hou’s 1998 masterpiece, Flowers of Shanghai. As for the fight scenes, they’re over almost before you realize they’ve happened, but they will stay in your mind’s eye forever. A Well Go USA release. U.S. Premiere

Bridge of Spies
Steven Spielberg, USA, 2015, DCP, 135m
The "bridge of spies" of the title refers to Glienicke Bridge, which crosses what was once the borderline between the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR. In the time from the building of the Berlin Wall to its destruction in 1989, there were three prisoner exchanges between East and West. The first and most famous spy swap occurred on February 10, 1962, when Soviet agent Rudolph Abel was traded for American pilot Francis Gary Powers, captured by the Soviets when his U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down over Sverdlovsk. The exchange was negotiated by Abel’s lawyer, James B. Donovan, who also arranged for the simultaneous release of American student Frederic Pryor at Checkpoint Charlie. Working from a script by Matt Charman and Joel and Ethan Coen, Steven Spielberg has brought every strange turn in this complex Cold War story to vividly tactile life. With a brilliant cast, headed by Tom Hanks as Donovan and Mark Rylance as Abel—two men who strike up an improbable friendship based on a shared belief in public service. A Touchstone Pictures release. World Premiere

Brooklyn
John Crowley, UK/Ireland/Canada, 2015, 35mm/DCP, 112m
In the middle of the last century, Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) takes the boat from Ireland to America in search of a better life. She endures the loneliness of the exile, boarding with an insular and catty collection of Irish girls in Brooklyn. Gradually, her American dream materializes: she studies bookkeeping and meets a handsome, sweet Italian boy (Emory Cohen). But then bad news brings her back home, where she finds a good job and another handsome boy (Domhnall Gleeson), this time from a prosperous family. On which side of the Atlantic does Eilis’s future live, and with whom? Director John Crowley (Boy A) and writer Nick Hornby haven’t just fashioned a great adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s novel, but a beautiful movie, a sensitively textured re-creation of the look and emotional climate of mid-century America and Ireland, with Ronan, as quietly and vibrantly alive as a silent-screen heroine, at its heart. A Fox Searchlight Pictures release.

Carol
Todd Haynes, USA, 2015, DCP, 118m
Todd Haynes’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel stars Cate Blanchett as the titular Carol, a wealthy suburban wife and mother, and Rooney Mara as an aspiring photographer who meet by chance, fall in love almost at first sight, and defy the closet of the early 1950s to be together. Working with his longtime cinematographer Ed Lachman and shooting on the Super-16 film he favors for the way it echoes the movie history of 20th-century America, Haynes charts subtle shifts of power and desire in images that are alternately luminous and oppressive. Blanchett and Mara are both splendid; the erotic connection between their characters is palpable from beginning to end, as much in its repression as in eagerly claimed moments of expressive freedom. Originally published under a pseudonym, Carol is Highsmith’s most affirmative work; Haynes has more than done justice to the multilayered emotions evoked by it source material. A Weinstein Company release.

Cemetery of Splendour
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/UK/France/Germany/Malaysia, 2015, DCP, 122m
Thai with English subtitles
The wondrous new film by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (whose last feature, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, was a Palme d’Or winner and a NYFF48 selection) is set in and around a hospital ward full of comatose soldiers. Attached to glowing dream machines, and tended to by a kindly volunteer (Jenjira Pongpas Widner) and a young clairvoyant (Jarinpattra Rueangram), the men are said to be waging war in their sleep on behalf of long-dead feuding kings, and their mysterious slumber provides the rich central metaphor: sleep as safe haven, as escape mechanism, as ignorance, as bliss. To slyer and sharper effect than ever, Apichatpong merges supernatural phenomena with Thailand’s historical phantoms and national traumas. Even more seamlessly than his previous films, this sun-dappled reverie induces a sensation of lucid dreaming, conjuring a haunted world where memory and myth intrude on physical space. A Strand Releasing release. U.S. Premiere

Les Cowboys
Thomas Bidegain, 2015, France, DCP, 114m
French and English with English subtitles
Country and Western enthusiast Alain (François Damiens) is enjoying an outdoor gathering of fellow devotees with his wife and teenage children when his daughter abruptly vanishes. Learning that she’s eloped with her Muslim boyfriend, he embarks on increasingly obsessive quest to track her down. As the years pass and the trail grows cold, Alain sacrifices everything, while drafting his son into his efforts. The echoes of The Searchers are unmistakable, but the story departs from John Ford’s film in unexpected ways, escaping its confining European milieu as the pursuit assumes near-epic proportions in post-9/11 Afghanistan. This muscular debut, worthy of director Thomas Bidegain’s screenwriting collaborations with Jacques Audiard, yields a sweeping vision of a world in which the codes of the Old West no longer seem to hold. A Cohen Media Group release. U.S. Premiere

Don’t Blink: Robert Frank
Laura Israel, USA/Canada, 2015, DCP, 82m
The life and work of Robert Frank—as a photographer and a filmmaker—are so intertwined that they’re one in the same, and the vast amount of territory he’s covered, from The Americans in 1958 up to the present, is intimately registered in his now-formidable body of artistic gestures. From the early ’90s on, Frank has been making his films and videos with the brilliant editor Laura Israel, who has helped him to keep things homemade and preserve the illuminating spark of first contact between camera and people/places. Don’t Blink is Israel’s like-minded portrait of her friend and collaborator, a lively rummage sale of images and sounds and recollected passages and unfathomable losses and friendships that leaves us a fast and fleeting imprint of the life of the Swiss-born man who reinvented himself the American way, and is still standing on ground of his own making at the age of 90. World Premiere

Experimenter
Michael Almereyda, USA, 2014, DCP, 94m
Michael Almereyda’s brilliant portrait of Stanley Milgram, the social scientist whose 1961, Yale-based “obedience study” reflected back on the Holocaust and anticipated Abu Ghraib and other atrocities carried out by ordinary people who were just following orders, places its subject in an appropriately experimental cinema framework. The proverbial elephant in the room materializes on screen; Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard) sometimes addresses the camera directly as if to implicate us in his studies and the unpleasant truths they reveal. Remarkably, the film evokes great compassion for this uncompromising, difficult man, in part because we often see him through the eyes of his wife (Winona Ryder, in a wonderfully grounded performance), who fully believed in his work and its profoundly moral purpose. Almereyda creates the bohemian-tinged academic world of the 1960s through the 1980s with an economy that Stanley Kubrick might have envied. A Magnolia Pictures release.

The Forbidden Room
Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson, Canada, 2015, DCP, 120m
The four-man crew of a submarine are trapped underwater, running out of air. A classic scenario of claustrophobic suspense—at least until a hatch opens and out steps… a lumberjack? As this newcomer’s backstory unfolds (and unfolds and unfolds in over a dozen outlandish tales), Guy Maddin, cinema’s reigning master of feverish filmic fetishism, embarks on a phantasmagoric narrative adventure of stories within stories within dreams within flashbacks in a delirious globe-trotting mise en abyme the equals of any by the late Raúl Ruiz. Collaborating with poet John Ashbery and featuring sublime contributions from the likes of Jacques Nolot, Charlotte Rampling, Mathieu Amalric, legendary cult electro-pop duo Sparks, and not forgetting muses Louis Negin and Udo Kier, Maddin dives deeper than ever: only the lovechild of Josef von Sternberg and Jack Smith could be responsible for this insane magnum opus. A Kino Lorber release.

In the Shadow of Women / L’Ombre des femmes
Philippe Garrel, France, 2015, DCP, 73m
French with English subtitles
The new film by the great Philippe Garrel (previously seen at the NYFF with Regular Lovers in 2005 and Jealousy in 2013) is a close look at infidelity—not merely the fact of it, but the particular, divergent ways in which it’s experienced and understood by men and women. Stanislas Merhar and Clotilde Courau are Pierre and Manon, a married couple working in fragile harmony on Pierre’s documentary film projects, the latest of which is a portrait of a resistance fighter (Jean Pommier). When Pierre takes a lover (Lena Paugam), he feels entitled to do so, and he treats both wife and mistress with disengagement bordering on disdain; when Manon catches Pierre in the act, her immediate response is to find common ground with her husband. Garrel is an artist of intimacies and emotional ecologies, and with In the Shadow of Women he has added narrative intricacy and intrigue to his toolbox. The result is an exquisite jewel of a film. U.S. Premiere

Journey to the Shore / Kishibe no tabi
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan/France, 2015, DCP, 127m
Japanese with English subtitles
Based on Kazumi Yumoto’s 2010 novel, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest film begins with a young widow named Mizuki (Eri Fukatsu), who has been emotionally flattened and muted by the disappearance of her husband Yusuke (Tadanobu Asano). One day, from out of the blue or the black, Yusuke’s ghost drops in, more like an exhausted and unexpected guest than a wandering spirit. And then Journey to the Shore becomes a road movie: Mizuki and Yusuke pack their bags, leave Tokyo, and travel by train through parts of Japan that we rarely see in movies, acclimating themselves to their new circumstances and stopping for extended stays with friends and fellow pilgrims that Yusuke has met on his way through the afterworld, some living and some dead. The particular beauty of Journey to the Shore lies in its flowing sense of life as balance between work and love, existence and nonexistence, you and me. U.S. Premiere

The Lobster
Yorgos Lanthimos, France/Netherlands/Greece/UK, 2015, DCP, 118m
In the very near future, society demands that we live as couples. Single people are rounded up and sent to a seaside compound—part resort and part minimum-security prison—where they are given a finite number of days to find a match. If they don’t succeed, they will be “altered” and turned into an animal. The recently divorced David (Colin Farrell) arrives at The Hotel with his brother, now a dog; in the event of failure, David has chosen to become a lobster… because they live so long. When David falls in love, he’s up against a new set of rules established by another, rebellious order: for romantics, there’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Welcome to the latest dark, dark comedy from Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth), creator of absurdist societies not so very different from our own. With Léa Seydoux as the leader of the Loners, Rachel Weisz as David’s true love, John C. Reilly, and Ben Whishaw. An Alchemy release.

Maggie’s Plan
Rebecca Miller, USA, 2015, DCP, 92m
Rebecca Miller’s new film is as wise, funny, and suspenseful as a Jane Austen novel. Greta Gerwig shines brightly in the role of Maggie, a New School administrator on the verge of completing her life plan with a donor-fathered baby when she meets John (Ethan Hawke), a soulful but unfulfilled adjunct professor. John is unhappily married to a Columbia-tenured academic superstar wound tighter than a coiled spring (Julianne Moore). Maggie and the professor commiserate, share confidences, and fall in love. And where most contemporary romantic comedies end, Miller’s film is just getting started. In the tradition of Woody Allen and Paul Mazursky, Miller approaches the genre of the New York romantic comedy with relish and loving energy. With Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph as Maggie’s married-with-children friends, drawn to defensive sarcasm like moths to a flame, and Travis Fimmel as Maggie’s donor-in-waiting. U.S. Premiere

The Measure of a Man / La Loi du marché
Stéphane Brizé, France, 2015, DCP, 93m
French with English subtitles
Vincent Lindon gives his finest performance to date as unemployed everyman Thierry, who must submit to a series of quietly humiliating ordeals in his search for work. Futile retraining courses that lead to dead ends, interviews via Skype, an interview-coaching workshop critique of his self-presentation by fellow jobseekers—all are mechanisms that seek to break him down and strip him of identity and self-respect in the name of reengineering of a workforce fit for an neoliberal technocratic system. Nothing if not determinist, Stéphane Brizé’s film dispassionately monitors the progress of its stoic protagonist until at last he lands a job on the front line in the surveillance and control of his fellow man—and finally faces one too many moral dilemmas. A powerful and deeply troubling vision of the realities of our new economic order. A Kino Lorber release. North American Premiere

Mia Madre
Nanni Moretti, Italy/France, 2015, DCP, 106m
Italian and English with English subtitles
Margherita (Margherita Buy) is a middle-aged filmmaker contending with shooting an international co-production with a mercurial American actor (John Turturro) and with the fact that her beloved mother (Giulia Lazzarini) is mortally ill. Underrated as an actor, director Nanni Moretti, offers a fascinating portrayal as Margherita’s brother, a quietly abrasive, intelligent man with a wonderfully tamped-down generosity and warmth. The construction of the film is as simple as it is beautiful: the chaos of the movie within the movie merges with the fear of disorder and feelings of pain and loss brought about by impending death. Mia Madre is a sharp and continually surprising work about the fragility of existence that is by turns moving, hilarious, and subtly disquieting. An Alchemy release. U.S. Premiere

Microbe & Gasoline / Microbe et Gasoil
Michel Gondry, France, 2015, DCP, 103m
French with English subtitles
The new handmade-SFX comedy from Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Be Kind Rewind) is set in an autobiographical key. Teenage misfits Microbe (Ange Dargent) and Gasoline (Théophile Baquet), one nicknamed for his size and the other for his love of all things mechanical and fuel-powered, become fast friends. Unloved in school and misunderstood at home—Microbe is overprotected, Gasoline is by turns ignored and abused—they decide to build a house on wheels (complete with a collapsible flower window box) and sputter, push, and coast their way to the camp where Gasoline went as a child, with a stop along the way to visit Microbe’s crush (Diane Besnier). Gondry’s visual imagination is prodigious, and so is his cultivation of spontaneously generated fun and off-angled lyricism, his absolute irreverence, and his emotional frankness. This is one of his freshest and loveliest films. With Audrey Tatou as Microbe’s mom. U.S. Premiere

Mountains May Depart
Jia Zhangke, China/France/Japan, 2015, DCP, 131m
Mandarin and English with English subtitles
The plot of Jia Zhangke’s new film is simplicity itself. Fenyang 1999, on the cusp of the capitalist explosion in China. Shen Tao (Zhao Tao) has two suitors—Zhang (Zhang Yi), an entrepreneur-to-be, and his best friend Liangzi (Liang Jin Dong), who makes his living in the local coal mine. Shen Tao decides, with a note of regret, to marry Zhang, a man with a future. Flash-forward 15 years: the couple’s son Dollar is paying a visit to his now-estranged mother, and everyone and everything seems to have grown more distant in time and space… and then further ahead in time, to even greater distances. Jia is modern cinema’s greatest poet of drift and the uncanny, slow-motion feeling of massive and inexorable change. Like his 2013 A Touch of Sin, Mountains May Depart is an epically scaled canvas. But where the former was angry and quietly terrifying, the latter is a heartbreaking prayer for the restoration of what has been lost in the name of progress. A Kino Lorber release. U.S. Premiere

My Golden Days / Trois Souvenirs de ma jeunesse
Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2015, DCP, 123m
French with English subtitles
Arnaud Desplechin’s alternately hilarious and heartrending latest work is intimate yet expansive, a true autobiographical epic. Mathieu Amalric—Jean-Pierre Léaud to Desplechin’s François Truffaut—reprises the character of Paul Dédalus from the director’s groundbreaking My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument (NYFF, 1996), now looking back on the mystery of his own identity from the lofty vantage point of middle age. Desplechin visits three varied but interlocking episodes in his hero’s life, each more surprising and richly textured than the next, and at the core of his film is the romance between the adolescent Paul (Quentin Dolmaire) and Esther (Lou Roy-Lecollinet). Most directors trivialize young love by slotting it into a clichéd category, but here it is ennobled and alive in all of its heartbreak, terror, and beauty. Le Monde recently referred to Desplechin as "the most Shakespearean of filmmakers," and boy, did they ever get that right. My Golden Days is a wonder to behold. A Magnolia Pictures release. North American Premiere

No Home Movie
Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France, 2015, DCP, 115m
French and English with English subtitles
At the center of Chantal Akerman’s enormous body of work is her mother, a Holocaust survivor who married and raised a family in Brussels. In recent years, the filmmaker has explicitly depicted, in videos, books, and installation works, her mother’s life and her own intense connection to her mother, and in turn her mother’s connection to her mother. No Home Movie is a portrait by Akerman, the daughter, of Akerman, the mother, in the last years of her life. It is an extremely intimate film but also one of great formal precision and beauty, one of the rare works of art that is both personal and universal, and as much a masterpiece as her 1975 career-defining Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. U.S. Premiere

Right Now, Wrong Then
Hong Sangsoo, South Korea, 2015, DCP, 121m
Korean with English subtitles
Ham Chunsu (Jung Jaeyoung) is an art-film director who has come to Suwon for a screening of one of his movies. He meets Yoon Heejung (Kim Minhee), a fledgling artist. She’s never seen any of his films but knows he’s famous; he’d like to see her paintings and then go for sushi and soju. Every word, every pause, every facial expression and every movement, is a negotiation between revelation and concealment: too far over the line for Chunsu and he’s suddenly a middle-aged man on the prowl who uses insights as tools of seduction; too far for Heejung and she’s suddenly acquiescing to a man who’s leaving the next day. So they walk the fine line all the way to a tough and mordantly funny end point, at which time… we begin again, but now with different emotional dynamics. Hong Sangsoo, represented many times in the NYFF, achieves a maximum of layered nuance with a minimum of people, places, and incidents. He is, truly, a master. U.S. Premiere

The Treasure / Comoara
Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania, 2015, DCP, 89m
Romanian with English subtitles
Costi (Cuzin Toma) leads a fairly quiet, unremarkable life with his wife and son. He’s a good provider, but he struggles to make ends meet. One evening there’s a knock at the door. It’s a stranger, a neighbor named Adrian (Adrian Purcarescu), with a business proposal: lend him some money to find a buried treasure in his grandparents’ backyard and they’ll split the proceeds. Is it a scam or a real treasure hunt? Corneliu Porumboiu’s (When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism, NYFF 2013) modern-day fable starts like an old Honeymooners episode with a get-rich-quick premise, gradually develops into a shaggy slapstick comedy, shifts gears into a hilariously dry delineation of the multiple layers of pure bureaucracy and paperwork drudgery, and ends in a new and altogether surprising key. Porumboiu is one of the subtlest artists in movies, and this is one of his wryest films, and his most magical.

Where To Invade Next
Michael Moore, USA, 2015, DCP, 110m
Where are we, as Americans? Where are we going as a country? And is it where we want to go, or where we think we have to go? Since Roger & Me in 1989, Michael Moore has been examining these questions and coming up with answers that are several worlds away from the ones we are used to seeing and hearing and reading in mainstream media, or from our elected officials. In his previous films, Moore has taken on one issue at a time, from the hemorrhaging of American jobs to the response to 9/11 to the precariousness of our healthcare system. In his new film, he shifts his focus to the whole shebang and ponders the current state of the nation from a very different perspective: that is, from the outside looking in. Where To Invade Next is provocative, very funny, and impassioned—just like all of Moore’s work. But it’s also pretty surprising. U.S. Premiere

The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced its avant-garde Projections series, the second NYFF sidebar series. You will find the complete listing of offerings here.

The lineup has been announced for Projections, the New York Film Festival’s avant-garde section, taking place from Friday, October 2 through Sunday, October 4. This year’s lineup, which includes 14 programs, presents an international selection of film and video work that expands upon our notions of what the moving image can do and be. Drawing on a broad range of innovative modes and techniques, including experimental narratives, avant-garde poetics, crossovers into documentary and ethnographic realms, and contemporary art practices, Projections brings together a diverse offering of short, medium, and feature-length work by some of today’s most vital and groundbreaking filmmakers and artists.

“We think of Projections, now in its second year, as the festival’s ever-shifting zone of discovery, a survey of inventive and unconventional work that updates and challenges our idea of what constitutes experimentation in cinema,” said Dennis Lim, the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Director of Programming and one of the curators of Projections

Convergence series.
The other, smaller, sidebar series is the interactive-focused Convergence series. You'll find that described here.

Details have been announced for the Convergence section of the 53rd New York Film Festival, which will take place on September 26 and 27. The annual program delves into the world of immersive storytelling with a mix of unique films, panels, and live interactive experiences. The schedule will be announced at a later date.

“This is our fourth year as part of the New York Film Festival and I couldn’t be more excited about the lineup for 2015,” said NYFF Convergence programmer Matt Bolish.

21 Aug. '15: the Film Society of Lincoln Center announces its other sidebar programs of special events and revivals. Here they are.

The Special Events lineup includes important new works and premieres, as well as a very special celebration of a beloved musical fantasia. The Revivals selections includes 11 international masterpieces from renowned filmmakers whose diverse and eclectic works have been digitally remastered, restored, and preserved with the assistance of generous partners, including Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, celebrating its 25th anniversary.

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS

Special Events

Filmmaker in Residence Screening:

Chevalier
Athina Rachel Tsangari, Greece, 2015, DCP, 104m
Greek with English subtitles
Six men set out on the Aegean Sea aboard a yacht, and before long, male bonding and one-upmanship give way to a loosely defined yet hotly contested competition to determine which of them is “the best in general.” As the games and trials grow more elaborate and absurd—everything is up for judgment, from sleeping positions to cholesterol levels to furniture-assembly skills—insecurities emerge and power relations shift. As in her 2010 breakthrough, Attenberg, Athina Rachel Tsangari, the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s 2015 Filmmaker in Residence, balances anthropological precision with a wry and wholly original sense of humor. Impeccably staged, crisply photographed, and buoyed by eclectic soundtrack choices (Petula Clark, Mark Lanegan), this maritime psychodrama becomes both funnier and richer in its implications as it progresses. What begins as a lampoon of bourgeois machismo and male anxiety develops into an incisive allegory for the state of contemporary Greece, and leaves a final impression as an empathetic, razor-sharp study of human nature itself. The Filmmaker in Residence program was launched in 2013 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Jaeger-LeCoultre as an annual initiative designed to support filmmakers at an early stage in the creative process against the backdrop of New York City and the New York Film Festival (NYFF). U.S. Premiere

De Palma
Noah Baumbach & Jake Paltrow, USA, 2015, DCP, 107m
Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s fleet and bountiful portrait covers the career of the number one iconoclast of American cinema, the man who gave us Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, and Carlito’s Way. Their film moves at the speed of De Palma’s thought (and sometimes works in subtle, witty counterpoint) as he goes title by title, covering his life from science nerd to New Hollywood bad boy to grand old man, and describes his ever-shifting position in this thing we call the movie business. Deceptively simple, De Palma is finally many things at once. It is a film about the craft of filmmaking—how it’s practiced and how it can be so easily distorted and debased. It’s an insightful and often hilarious tour through American moviemaking from the 1960s to the present, and a primer on how movies are made and unmade. And it’s a surprising, lively, and unexpectedly moving portrait of a great, irascible, unapologetic, and uncompromising New York artist. In conjunction with this film, we will also be showing De Palma’s masterpiece Blow Out. North American Premiere

Heart of a Dog
Laurie Anderson, USA/France, 2015, DCP, 75m
In Laurie Anderson’s plainspoken all-American observational-autobiographical art, voices and harmonies and rhythms and images are juxtaposed and layered, metaphors are generated, and the mind of the viewer/listener is sent spinning into the stratosphere. It’s been nine years since her last film and almost 30 since her last feature. Heart of a Dog is her response to a commission from Arte, a work of braided joy and heartbreak and remembering and forgetting, at the heart of which is a lament for her late beloved piano-playing and finger-painting dog Lolabelle. Life in the neighborhood—downtown New York after 9/11... the archiving of surveillance records in ziggurat-like structures… Lolabelle’s passage through the bardo… recollections of deaths and near-deaths, terrors personal and global, sad goodbyes and funny ones, dreams and imagined flights… acceptance: Heart of a Dog is as immediate as a paragraph by Kerouac, as disarmingly playful as a Cole Porter melody, as rhapsodically composed as a poem by Whitman, and a thing of rare beauty.

Junun
Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2015, English and Indian, DCP, 54m
English, Hindu, Hebrew, and Urdu with English subtitles
Earlier this year, Paul Thomas Anderson joined his close friend and collaborator Jonny Greenwood on a trip to Rajasthan in northwest India, where they were hosted by the Maharaja of Jodhpur, and he brought his camera with him. Their destination was the 15th-century Mehrangarh Fort, where Greenwood (with the help of Radiohead engineer Nigel Godrich) was recording an album with Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur and an amazing group of musicians: Aamir Bhiyani, Soheb Bhiyani, Ajaj Damami, Sabir Damami, Hazmat, and Bhanwaru Khan on brass; Ehtisham Khan Ajmeri, Nihal Khan, Nathu Lal Solanki, Narsi Lal Solanki, and Chugge Khan on percussion; Zaki Ali Qawwal, Zakir Ali Qawwal, Afshana Khan, Razia Sultan, Gufran Ali, and Shazib Ali on vocals; and Dara Khan and Asin Khan on strings. The finished film, just under an hour, is pure magic. Junun lives and breathes music, music-making, and the close camaraderie of artistic collaboration. It’s a lovely impressionistic mosaic and a one-of-a-kind sonic experience: the music will blow your mind. World Premiere

Anniversary Screening:

O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Joel and Ethan Coen, 2000, USA, DCP, 107m
This year marks the 15th anniversary of Joel and Ethan Coen’s beloved roots-musical fantasia, “based upon The Odyssey, by Homer,” about three escaped convicts (George Clooney, Tim Blake Nelson, and John Turturro) trying to get back home in the rural South of the 1930s. Bigger than life, endlessly surprising, eye-popping (“they wanted it to look like an old hand-tinted picture,” said DP Roger Deakins), and as giddily and defiantly unclassifiable as all other Coen films, O Brother, Where Art Thou? is, among many other things, a celebration of American music. With a score curated and produced by T-Bone Burnett, the movie sings with voices and sounds of some of the best musicians in the country, including Ralph Stanley, the Fairfield Four, Alison Krauss, John Hartford, Emmylou Harris, and Gillian Welch, and the melodies of classics like “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” “I’ll Fly Away,” and the film’s touchstone, “Man of Constant Sorrow.” Cast members, musical guests, and Joel and Ethan Coen will be on hand. Bring your instrument! A Touchstone Pictures and Universal Pictures release.

Film Comment Presents:

Son of Saul
László Nemes, Hungary, 2015, 35mm, 107m
Hungarian and German with English subtitles
A film that looks into the abyss, this shattering portrait of the horror of Auschwitz follows Saul (Géza Röhrig), a Sonderkommando tasked with delivering his fellow Jews to the gas chamber. Determined to give a young boy a proper Jewish burial, Saul descends through the death camp’s circles of Hell, while a rebellion brews among the prisoners. A bombshell debut from director and co-writer László Nemes, Son of Saul is an utterly harrowing, ultra-immersive experience, and not for the fainthearted. With undeniably virtuoso plan-séquence camerawork in the mode of Nemes’s teacher Béla Tarr, this startling film represents a new benchmark in the historic cinematic depictions of the Holocaust. A deeply troubling work, sure to be one of the year’s most controversial films. A Sony Picture Classics release.

Revivals

Blow Out
Brian De Palma, USA, 1981, 35mm, 107m
One of Brian De Palma’s greatest films and one of the great American films of the 1980s, Blow Out is such a hallucinatory, emotionally and visually commanding experience that the term “thriller” seems insufficient. De Palma takes a variety of elements—the Kennedy assassination; Chappaquiddick; Antonioni’s Blow-Up; the slasher genre that was then in full flower; elements of Detective Bob Leuci’s experiences working undercover for the Knapp Commission; the harshness and sadness of American life; and, as ever, Hitchcock’s Vertigo—and swirls and mixes them into a film that builds to a truly shattering conclusion. With John Travolta, in what is undoubtedly his greatest performance, as the sound man for low-budget movies who accidentally records a murder; Nancy Allen, absolutely heartbreaking, as the girl caught in the middle; John Lithgow as the hired killer; and De Palma stalwart Dennis Franz as the world’s biggest sleaze. This was the second of three collaborations between De Palma and the master DP Vilmos Zsigmond. MGM Home Entertainment.

Ran
Akira Kurosawa, Japan/France, 1985, DCP, 160m
Japanese with English subtitles
The 1985 New York Film Festival opened with Akira Kurosawa’s astonishing medieval epic, inspired by the life of Mori Motonari, a 16th-century warlord with three sons. It was only after he began writing that the filmmaker started to see parallels with King Lear. It took a decade for Kurosawa to bring his grand conception to the screen—he actually painted storyboards of every shot along the way, and made another great film, Kagemusha, as a dry run. The finished work he eventually gave us was, to put it mildly, a mind-blowing experience. Tatsuya Nakadai is the warlord, Akira Terao, Jinpachi Nezu, and Daisuke Ryu are his sons, Mieko Harada is the terrifying Lady Kaede, the score is by Toru Takemitsu, but the dominant force looming over every single element of this film, down to the smallest detail, is Kurosawa himself. The color palette of Ran is unlike that of any other movie made before or since, as you’ll see in this newly restored version. Restoration by StudioCanal with the participation of Kadokawa Pictures. A Rialto Films release.

A Touch of Zen
King Hu, Hong Kong, 1971/75, DCP, 200m
Mandarin with English subtitles
When it comes to the wuxia film, all roads lead back to the great King Hu: supreme fantasist, Ming dynasty scholar, and incomparable artist. For years, Hu labored on his own, creating one exquisitely crafted film after another (with astonishing pre-CGI visual effects), elevating the martial-arts genre to unparalleled heights and, as the film critic and producer Peggy Chiao noted in her obituary for Hu, single-handedly introducing Chinese cinema to the rest of the world. Hu’s three-years-in-the-making masterpiece, A Touch of Zen, was released in truncated form in Hong Kong in 1971 and yanked from theaters after a week. A close-to-complete version was constructed by Hu and shown at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, where Hu won a grand prize for technical achievement (which earned King Hu an apology from his studio heads). This beautiful restoration of A Touch of Zen was presented at this year’s edition of Cannes, 40 years after the film’s first unveiling to Western eyes. Restored in 4K by L’Immagine Ritrovata, with original materials provided by the Taiwan Film Institute. A Janus Films release.

Visit, or Memories and Confessions
Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal, 1982, 35mm, 73m
Portuguese with English subtitles
The late, great Manoel de Oliveira stipulated that this film—made in 1982—be screened publicly only after his death. One of the Portuguese master’s most exquisite and moving films, and certainly his most personal, Visit assumes the rare form of an auto-elegy. A prowling camera finds Oliveira, who died at 106 this past April, in the Porto house where he had lived for four decades and that he is preparing to leave due to mounting debts. He addresses the audience directly, setting the film’s droll, convivial tone, and discusses a wide range of topics (family history, cinema, architecture), shares home movies, and reenacts his run-in with the military dictatorship. Oliveira’s improbable career took the form of a long goodbye, but this actual farewell is no less touching in its simplicity and lucidity. He made the film at age 73, presumably expecting he was near the end of his life. He would in fact live another 33 years and make another 25 or so films, some of them among his greatest, in an extended twilight that was also an artistic prime unlike any other. An Instituto Portugues de Cinema release.

Celebrating 25 Years of The Film Foundation

This year marks the 25th anniversary of The Film Foundation. Following his successful campaign in the early ’80s to develop a more durable color film stock, Martin Scorsese founded the organization to raise awareness of the fragility of film and to create a genuine consciousness of film preservation. Since its inception in 1990, TFF has partnered with archives, studios, and labs around the world to restore over 700 films. We’re presenting seven of their newest restorations.

Black Girl / La Noire de…
Ousmane Sembene, France/Senegal, 1965, DCP, 65m
French with English subtitles
Ousmane Sembene’s first feature—really, the movie that opened the way for African cinema in the West—is by turns tough, swift, and true in its aim. A young woman (Mbissine Thérèse Diop) leaves Senegal with dreams of a more carefree and glamorous existence in France, where she procures a job as a live-in maid and nanny for a young couple in the French Riviera. She is gradually deadened by the endless routines and tasks and rhythms of life in the tiny apartment, and by the dissatisfactions felt by the husband and wife, which they project onto their “black girl.” Sembene’s “perfect short story,” wrote Manny Farber, naming it as his movie of 1969, “is unlike anything in the film library: translucent and no tricks, amazingly pure, but spiritualized.” A formative and eye-opening work, and one of Sembene’s finest. Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project in collaboration with the Sembene Estate, Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, INA, Eclair laboratories, and Centre National de Cinématographie. Restoration carried out at Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory. A Janus Films release.

The Boys from Fengkuei
Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan, 1983, DCP, 101m
Mandarin with English subtitles
This “group portrait of four laddish adolescents on the razzle in Kaohsiung as they approach the onset of adult life” (Tony Rayns) is Hou Hsiao-hsien’s fourth film, but he has long considered it to be the real beginning of his career as a moviemaker. “I had very intense feelings at the time,” Hou told Sam Ho, “and I think the film has an intense energy. An artist’s early work might be lacking in craft but, at the same time, be very powerful, very direct. Later, when I wanted to return to that initial intensity, I no longer could.” In the tradition of Fellini’s I Vitelloni, The Boys from Fengkuei is a deeply personal look back at the director’s own adolescence—at the boredom of living in the middle of nowhere and the overwhelming need to get up and move, and get out and away to the big city. A glorious young-man’s film, and the first great work of the Taiwanese New Wave. Restoration by the Cineteca di Bologna. A Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique release.

Heaven Can Wait
Ernst Lubitsch, USA, 1943, 35mm, 112m
The legendary Ernst Lubitsch’s portrait of a turn-of-the-century hedonist extraordinaire begins at the gate of hell—not Dante’s Inferno but a handsome art-deco waiting room, where a courtly Satan (Laird Cregar) conducts an admission interview with the recently deceased Henry Van Cleve (Don Ameche). Henry’s leisurely stroll through the past is a very funny comedy of manners and a lovely rendering of Old New York. Lubitsch’s writing with Samson Raphaelson — Satan: “I presume your funeral was satisfactory.” Henry: “Well, there was a lot of crying, so I believe everybody had a good time.”—and his meticulous direction are all of a piece. The film’s glorious, candy-box Technicolor has now been beautifully restored by Schawn Belston and his team at 20th Century Fox, just in time for the 100th Anniversary of the Fox Film Corporation. With Gene Tierney, Louis Calhern, Eugene Pallette, Marjorie Main, and Charles Coburn as Henry’s grandfather and fellow black sheep. Restored by 20th Century Fox in collaboration with the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation. A 20th Century Fox release.

Insiang
Lino Brocka, Philippines, 1976, DCP, 95m
Tagalog and Filipino with English subtitles
In Lino Brocka’s searing 1976 melodrama (one could use the same adjective to describe all of his melodramas), the eponymous heroine, played by Hilda Koronel, is raped by her mother’s boyfriend, then blamed for provoking the act and forced out of her own home. “Insiang is, first and foremost, a character analysis,” wrote the director. “I need this character to recreate the ‘violence’ stemming from urban overpopulation, to show the annihilation of a human being, the loss of human dignity caused by the physical and social environment…” The people in Brocka’s films live in dire circumstances, offset by their extreme vitality and their electrically charged encounters. Insiang, a failure on its home ground but the first film from the Philippines to be invited to Cannes, is one of its director’s best. It is also the second of Brocka’s works to be restored by the World Cinema Project. With Mona Lisa as Insiang’s mother. Restored in 2015 by Cineteca di Bologna/L'Immagine Ritrovata. Restoration funding provided by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project and the Film Development Council of the Philippines. A Film Foundation release.

The Long Voyage Home
John Ford, USA, 1940, DCP, 105m
Independently produced by Walter Wanger, John Ford’s soulful, heartbreaking film is based on four Eugene O’Neill one-acts about life at sea (the playwright himself loved the movie so much that he acquired his own 16mm print). Ford, working with his screenwriter Dudley Nichols and his brilliant cameraman Gregg Toland (they had just collaborated on The Grapes of Wrath), updates the plays to World War II and condenses the action, creating tonal variations on the aching loneliness of life at sea and the longing for home. In the words of Ford biographer Joseph McBride, the director and his DP “broke all the rules of conventional Hollywood cinematography” and created “a doom-laden mood with deep pools of light and shadow”—seen to full advantage in this beautiful restoration. The Long Voyage Home is a true ensemble piece featuring many of the actors that comprised Ford’s “stock company,” including Thomas Mitchell, Barry Fitzgerald and his brother Arthur Shields, John Qualen, and, unforgettably, John Wayne as the Swedish sailor Ole. Restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and The Film Foundation. A Westchester Films and Shout! Factory release.

The Memory of Justice
Marcel Ophüls, UK/USA/France/Germany, 1976, DCP, 278m
French with English subtitles
The third of Marcel Ophüls’ monumental inquiries into the questions of individual and collective guilt fueling the calamities of war and genocide, The Memory of Justice examines the defining tragedies of the Western world in the second half of the 20th century, from the Nuremberg trials through the French-Algerian war to the disaster of Vietnam, building from a vast range of interviews, from Telford Taylor (Counsel for the Prosecution at Nuremberg, later a harsh critic of our escalating involvement in Vietnam) to Nazi architect Albert Speer to Daniel Ellsberg and Joan Baez. As Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times when The Memory of Justice was screened at the 1976 New York Film Festival, Ophüls’ film “expands the possibilities of the documentary motion picture in such a way that all future films of this sort will be compared to it.” Seldom seen since its premiere and then only in rare 16mm prints, the film has now been painstakingly restored. Restored by the Academy Film Archive in association with Paramount Pictures and The Film Foundation. Restoration funding provided by The Material World Charitable Foundation, Righteous Persons Foundation, and The Film Foundation. A Film Foundation release.

Rocco and His Brothers
Luchino Visconti, Italy/France, 1960, DCP, 177m
Italian with English subtitles
Luchino Visconti’s rich and expansive masterpiece, the story of a mother and her grown sons who head north from Lucania in search of work and new lives, has an emotional intensity and a tragic grandeur matched by few other films. Visconti turned to Giovanni Testori, Thomas Mann, Dostoyevsky, and Arthur Miller for inspiration, and he achieved an truly epic sweep: in one beautifully realized scene after another, we observe the tragic progress of a tightly knit family coming apart, one frayed thread at a time. Alain Delon is Rocco, Renato Salvatori is his brother Simone, Annie Girardot is the woman who comes between them, and Katina Paxinou is the matriarch, Rosaria. Rocco and His Brothers, one of the great and defining films of its era, has now been beautifully restored, and Giuseppe Rotunno’s black-and-white images are once again as pearly and lustrous as they were meant to be. Restored by Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata in association with Titanus, TF1 Droits Audiovisuels, and The Film Foundation. Restoration funding provided by Gucci and The Film Foundation. A Milestone Film release.

press release (Click on the title above for an illustrated version on teh FSLC website www.filmlinc.com.)

New York, NY (August 24, 2015)

THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER ANNOUNCED TODAY THE COMPLETE LINEUP FOR THE SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY SECTION FOR THE 53RD NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

Launches with Academy Award–winning director Laura Poitras’s latest work; and will include the World Premiere of Everything Is Copy, an intimate portrait of Nora Ephron; Frederick Wiseman’s 40th feature documentary, In Jackson Heights; Walter Salles’s new film, Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang; and more

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS

Everything Is Copy
Jacob Bernstein, 2015, USA, DCP, 89m
Jacob Bernstein’s extremely entertaining film is a tribute to his mother Nora Ephron: Hollywood-raised daughter of screenwriters who grew up to be an ace reporter turned piercingly funny essayist turned novelist/screenwriter/playwright/director. Ephron comes vibrantly alive onscreen via her words; the memories of her sisters, colleagues, former spouses, and many friends; scenes from her movies; and, above all, her own inimitable presence. Watch any given moment of Ephron being her sparkling but caustically witty self (for instance, this response to a scolding talk show host—“You have a soft spot for Julie Nixon, don’t you. See, I don’t…”) and you find it hard to believe that she’s been gone from our midst for three years. Everything Is Copy (Ephron’s motto, inherited from her mother) is a lovingly drawn but frank portrait and, incidentally, a vivid snapshot of an earlier, livelier, bitchier, and funnier moment in New York culture. An HBO Documentary Films release. World Premiere

Field of Vision: New Episodic Nonfiction
Laura Poitras, USA/Germany, 2015, HDCAM
A selection of short-form episodic works, including installments of Asylum, in which Laura Poitras (whose CITIZENFOUR had its world premiere at last year’s NYFF) shadows WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as he publishes classified diplomatic cables and seeks asylum in London’s Ecuadorian embassy. World Premiere

Fish Tail / Rabo de Peixe
Joaquim Pinto & Nuno Leonel, Portugal, 2015, DCP, 103m
Portuguese with English subtitles
In his 2013 masterpiece What Now? Remind Me (NYFF51), Joaquim Pinto turned a first-person diary about chronic illness into an all-encompassing meditation on what it means to be alive. His latest film, co-directed with his husband Nuno Leonel, pulls off a similar balancing act between intimacy and expansiveness. The setting is the Azorean island of Rabo de Peixe, where small-scale fishermen introduce the filmmakers to the rhythms of their labor-intensive routines, artisanal traditions that face extinction in the global economy. Initially broadcast on Portuguese television in an abbreviated version, this new director’s cut is a tender portrait of a community that, through Pinto’s associative narration, frequently extends into more personal and philosophical realms, contemplating such topics as the value of manual work and the meaning of freedom. Fish Tail is as lovely as it is quietly profound, a film that at once acknowledges and transcends cinema’s long romance with maritime ethnography. North American Premiere

Homeland (Iraq Year Zero)
Part 1: Before the Fall
Part 2: After the Battle
Abbas Fahdel, Iraq/France, 2015, DCP, 160m/174m (2 parts, 5 1/2 hrs. total)
Arabic with English subtitles
In February 2002—about a year before the U.S. invasion in 2003—Iraqi filmmaker Abbas Fahdel traveled home from France to capture everyday life as his country prepared for war. He zeroed in on family and friends as they went about their business, with much of the action seen through the eyes of the director’s 12-year-old nephew, Haider. When Fahdel returned in 2003, two weeks after the invasion, daily activities like going to school or shopping at the market had become nearly impossible; many areas of Baghdad had been closed off to ordinary citizens, yet everyone pressed on. The young Haider represents, in various ways, the voice of his people: “They are occupiers and we can’t oppose them. Our country has become like Palestine,” he tells a neighbor. Fahdel’s epic yet intimate film paints a compelling portrait of people simply trying to exist in the midst of constant turmoil, and describes the fine line between life and death that civilians in a war zone must walk from day to day. North American Premiere

Immigration Battle
Michael Camerini & Shari Robertson, USA, 2015, DCP, 111m
Michael Camerini and Shari Robertson have been chronicling the protracted struggle for American immigration reform over the past 16 years, crossing the country numerous times to film politicians and activists on both sides of this great and divisive issue. They gained unprecedented fly-on-the-wall access to the key players in Washington as they rode the momentum toward the passage of a bipartisan bill, only to see it shot down, which meant that they had to begin pushing the boulder back up the hill all over again. Two years ago, NYFF51 screened Camerini and Robertson’s series of immigration films, How Democracy Works, and now we present Immigration Battle, their final film on the subject. The key player this time is Democrat Luis Gutiérrez, the charismatic U.S. Representative for the 4th congressional district of Illinois, who negotiates his way through this political minefield—past an obstructionist majority playing to an anti-immigrant base and a President who has just been dubbed the “Deporter-in-Chief” by the pro-reform community—while keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the prize. World Premiere

Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words
Stig Björkman, Sweden, 2015, DCP, 114m
Swedish with English subtitles
This is a lovingly crafted film about one of the cinema’s most luminous and enchanting presences, composed from her letters and diaries (extracts of which are read by Alicia Vikander), the memories of her children (Pia Lindström and Isabella, Ingrid, and Roberto Rossellini), and a few close friends and colleagues (including Liv Ullmann and Sigourney Weaver), photographs, and moments from thousands of feet of Super-8 and 16mm footage shot by Bergman herself throughout the years. Stig Björkman’s focus is not on Bergman the star but on Bergman the woman and mother: orphaned at 13, drawn to acting on the stage and then on film, sailing for Hollywood at 24 and then leaving it all behind for a new and different life with Roberto Rossellini. Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words is, finally, a self-portrait of a truly independent woman. A Rialto Pictures release.

In Jackson Heights
Frederick Wiseman, USA, 2015, DCP, 190m
Fred Wiseman’s 40th feature documentary is about Jackson Heights, Queens, one of New York City’s liveliest and most culturally diverse neighborhoods, a thriving and endlessly changing crossroad of styles, cuisines, and languages, and now—like vast portions of our city—caught in the gears of economic “development.” Wiseman’s mastery is as total as it is transparent: his film moves without apparent effort from an LGBT support meeting to a musical street performance to a gathering of Holocaust survivors to a hilarious training class for aspiring taxi drivers to an ace eyebrow-removal specialist at work to the annual Gay Pride parade to a meeting of local businessmen in a beauty parlor to discuss the oncoming economic threat to open-air merchants selling their wares to a meeting of undocumented individuals facing deportation. Wiseman catches the textures of New York life in 2015, the music of our speech, and a vast, emotionally complex, dynamic tapestry is woven before our eyes. A Zipporah Films release.

Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang
Walter Salles, Brazil/France, 2014, DCP, 99m
Mandarin with English subtitles
Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles accompanies the prolific Chinese director Jia Zhangke (whose latest, Mountains May Depart, is screening in this year’s Main Slate) on a walk down memory lane, as he revisits his hometown and other locations used in creating his vast body of work. At each location, they visit Jia’s family, friends, and former colleagues, and their conversations range from his mother’s tales of him as a young boy to amusing remembrances of school days and film shoots to memories of his father and the fact that if not for pirated DVDs, much of Jia’s work would go unseen in China. All the roads traveled are part of one journey—the destination of which is Jia’s relationship to his past and to his country. And the confluence of storytelling, intellect, and politics informing all of Jia’s work is brought to light in this lovely, intimate portrait of the artist on his way to the future. North American Premiere

Rebel Citizen
Pamela Yates, USA, 2015, DCP, 75m
Pamela Yates’s new film grew out of her friendship with master cinematographer and fellow activist Haskell Wexler, who’s still going strong at 93. Wexler asked Yates to represent him at a retrospective of his documentary work at this year’s Cinéma du Réel festival in Paris, and she responded by making a film portrait of her mentor and longtime collaborator. Wexler—in an interview with Yates shot by Travis Wilkerson, another comrade-in-arms—speaks with warmth, lucidity, and absolute certitude about his left-wing political beliefs, his craft, and his aesthetics, which are fundamentally one in the same. Rebel Citizen takes us on a revelatory tour of Wexler’s work, and it includes clips from his early documentary The Bus, shot aboard a bus on its way across the country to the 1963 March on Washington, as well as Medium Cool and Underground, his film about the Weatherman co-directed with Emile de Antonio and Mary Lampson. A Skylight Pictures release. World Premiere

Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art
James Crump, USA, 2015, DCP, 72m
The titular troublemakers are the New York–based Land (aka Earth) artists of the 1960s and 70s, who walked away from the reproducible and the commodifiable, migrated to the American Southwest, worked with earth and light and seemingly limitless space, and rethought the question of scale and the relationships between artist, landscape, and viewer. Director James Crump (Black White + Gray) has meticulously constructed Troublemakers from interviews (with Germano Celant, Virginia Dwan, and others), photos and footage of Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and Charles Ross at work on their astonishing creations: Heizer’s Double Negative, a 1,500-feet long “line” cut between two canyons on Mormon Mesa in Nevada; Holt’s concrete Sun Tunnels, through each of which the sun appears differently according to the season; De Maria’s The Lightning Field in New Mexico; and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, built on the Great Salt Lake in Utah. A beautiful tribute to a great moment in art.

We Are Alive / On est vivants
Carmen Castillo, France/Belgium, 2015, DCP, 100m
French, Spanish, and Portuguese with English subtitles
What comprises political engagement in 2015? Is it still possible to influence the course of events in this world? These are the questions posed by the great Chilean filmmaker Carmen Castillo (her Calle Santa Fe was a selection of the 2007 NYFF) in this new documentary essay. Castillo, herself a one-time MIR militant expelled from Chile by the Pinochet regime, structures her film in dialogue with the writings of her late friend Daniel Bensaïd, organizer of the Paris student revolts in May ’68 and France’s leading Trotskyite philosopher. In Europe and Latin America, Castillo finds the ones who have resisted, from the masked Zapatistas of Chiapas in Mexico to the Water Warriors of Cochabamba in Bolivia, from the Landless Workers movement in Brazil to the striking workers at the Donges refinery in western France to the homeless squatters of Marseille. A mournful premise lays the groundwork for a radiantly hopeful film.
North American Premiere

The Witness
James Solomon, 2015, USA, DCP, 96m
On March 13, 1964, in Kew Gardens, Queens, Kitty Genovese was stabbed, raped, robbed, and left to die by a man named Winston Moseley. On March 27, at the urging of Metro editor A.M. Rosenthal, The New York Times published an investigative report asserting that 38 eyewitnesses saw the attack and retreated to their apartments, and the case quickly became a symbol of urban apathy. Genovese’s family lost her twice: once to a murderer and once more to legend, a legend that would be questioned, dismantled, and discredited 40 years later in the very paper that had created it. James Solomon’s quiet, concentrated, and devastating film closely follows the efforts of Genovese’s brother Bill, 16 at the time of Kitty’s death, to track down the people who knew her, loved her, and tried to help her, to arrange a possible meeting with her killer, and to recover the presence of his beloved sister. A Submarine release. World Premiere

Talk appearances by Hou Hsiau-hsien, Jia Zhang-ke, Michael Moore, and Todd Haynes are planned. Many shorts in an expanded series of sidebar presentations of all kinds this year that no one person could cover. The press release is below. Filmleaf's Festival Coverage will include any that are scheduled with the press screenings. For illustrated details click on the title above or the NYFF logo below for the Film Society of Lincoln Center's website's illustrated announcements of these offerings.

Hou Hsiau-hsien

On CinemaHou Hsiao-hsien
Hou Hsiao-hsien directed his first film in 1980, after years of assisting and writing for other filmmakers. Three years later, he made the autobiographical The Boys from Fengkuei, which he considers to be the real beginning of his work as an artist in cinema. From there, he went on to create several of the defining works of the Taiwanese New Wave, one of the greatest moments in the cinema of the last decades, and then to make one astonishing film after another. With every new movie from The Puppetmaster (NYFF 1993) on, Hou redefined the very idea of what a movie was, for himself and for the rest of us. Immersive, grounded in history and change but tuned to the smallest nuances of gesture, light, color, and atmosphere, every individual Hou film arrives as a shock. And his new film The Assassin, his first in eight years, is no exception: audiences in Cannes were left open-mouthed. It’s been a long time since Hou has been in New York, and we’re very pleased that this true master accepted our invitation to discuss some of the movies that have marked him in his life as a filmmaker.
Saturday, October 10, 3:30pm

Directors Dialogues

Jia Zhangke
If, hundreds of years from now, anyone wanted to know what it was like to be alive at this moment—what life felt like and what changes were occurring and the ways in which they affected us as individuals—they could get the whole picture from watching the films of Jia Zhangke. From the moment he burst on the scene with Xiao Wu in the late ’90s, this artist has given us a river of films, made with a team of regular collaborators (including his wife and principal actress Zhao Tao and his cinematographer Yu Lik-wai), each film as pungently human but wide in scope as a Breugel canvas. The world itself is a character in Jia’s films, urging the characters on and informing the speed of life. We’ve shown many of his movies in the NYFF over the years, from Platform in 2000 on, and we’re proud to have him here with his newest movie, Mountains May Depart, and we’re very happy that he’s agreed to join us for a talk about his extraordinary body of work.
Tuesday, September 29, 6:00pm

Michael Moore
“Democracy is not a spectator sport, it’s a participatory event,” said Michael Moore at a 2009 press conference. “If we don’t participate in it, it ceases to be a democracy.” Moore has been an active participant since his childhood in Flint, Michigan, where he was raised in a union family—his uncle was actually a UAW founder and a participant in the great General Motors sit-down strike of 1936. In 1989, Moore’s participation took the form of a film called Roger & Me (NYFF 1989), a spirited, funny, white-hot attack on GM, which had by then moved most of their jobs out of the country and devastated the once-thriving region, a scenario that was repeated many times throughout the country. In the years since, Moore has been launching brilliantly planned comic attacks on the NRA and the gun industry (Bowling for Columbine), the American response to 9/11 (Fahrenheit 9/11), the health-care industry (Sicko), capitalism itself (Capitalism: A Love Story), and, with his new film Where To Invade Next, the divide between America’s lofty self-image and the less impressive reality. We’re happy to have him back at the NYFF for this discussion about his movies.
Sunday, October 4, 3:00pm

Todd Haynes
A genuinely independent filmmaker, Todd Haynes has an impressive body of work that is grounded in the pressures of conformity, bearing down on individuals and sometimes resulting in illness (Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, Safe) or other forms of entrapment (Far from Heaven, Mildred Pierce), sometimes in transcendence (Velvet Goldmine, I’m Not There). With Carol, his remarkable new adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, Haynes has given us a delicately nuanced work about the slowly evolving romance between two women in 1950s America, and found a reverberant emotionalism with his actors (Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara) and his cinematographer (the great Ed Lachman) that is a wonder to behold. We’re excited to have this singular artist joining us for a discussion about his work.
Saturday, October 10, 12:00pm

SHORTS PROGRAM

NYFF SHORTS PROGRAM 1: INTERNATIONAL (TRT: 85M)

Featuring films by a selection of new talents, this year’s lineup of shorts includes lyrical work from Australia and Chile, a pair of Buenos Aires–set romps from Argentine co-productions, and a bittersweet goodbye story from Austria. Programmed by Sarah Mankoff.

La Novia de Frankenstein
Agostina Gálvez & Francisco Lezama, Portugal/Argentina, 2015, DCP, 13m
Spanish with English subtitles
Ivana works for an agency that rents out apartments out to English-speaking tourists, but her sticky finger side-hustle suggests self-employment might be more her style. North American Premiere

Monaco
David Easteal, Australia, 2015, DCP, 13m
A young man goes door to door in search of an automotive apprenticeship, and spending his free time kicking up dust doing donuts with his buddies in the outskirts of Melbourne. North American Premiere

Carry On
Rafael Haider, Austria, 2015, DCP, 22m
German with English subtitles
When his donkey gets sick, an old farmer is hesitant to betray his fondness for the animal to his matter-of-fact wife who insists on putting the donkey down.

Marea de Tierra
Manuela Martelli & Amirah Tajdin, Chile/France, 2015, DCP, 15m
Spanish with English subtitles
On the southern Chilean archipelago of Chiloe, a lovelorn teenage girl on vacation swaps tales of heartbreak with a group of local women who gather seaweed. North American Premiere

The Mad Half Hour
Leonardo Brzezicki, Argentina/Denmark, 2015, DCP, 22m
Juan suddenly balks at commitment, prompting his boyfriend to lead him on a romantic night of wandering city streets. Named for the time of day when house cats go inexplicably wild. North American Premiere

NYFF SHORTS PROGRAM 2: HORROR (TRT: 93M)

In a program brand-new to the NYFF focusing on the best in genre film—horror, thrillers, sci-fi, twisted noir, and fantasy shorts from around the world—this handful of tales from the dark side features a period piece of terror in distant lands from the co-director of Persepolis, a haunted psyche that reveals itself in very strange ways, a lesson in being bad, horror-film love turned life-threatening, and some silent but deadly revenge. Programmed by Laura Kern.

Territory / Territoire
Vincent Paronnaud, France, 2014, DCP, 22m
French with English subtitles
A sheepherder and his trusty dog witness unspeakable horrors in a remote valley of the French Pyrenees in 1957.

We Wanted More
Stephen Dunn, Canada, 2013, DCP, 16m
Laryngitis may be a singer’s worst nightmare, but battling deep anxieties about life’s sacrifices can be even more terrifying.

Sânge
Percival Argüero Mendoza, Mexico, 2015, DCP, 19m
Spanish with English subtitles
Upon viewing the mysterious, bone-chilling titular film, a young woman’s horror obsession—taken far from seriously by her boyfriend—blends dangerously with reality. U.S. Premiere

How to Be a Villain
Helen O’Hanlon, UK, 2015, DCP, 16m
In this delightfully demented homage to the golden days of monster movies, Supervillain (a perfect Terence Harvey) leads us on a thrilling guided tour of the ways of evil.

NYFF SHORTS PROGRAM 3: ANIMATION (TRT: 56M)
An eclectic mix of styles and themes, this program of animated shorts brings New York audiences a selection of stunning recent works from around the globe. Please note: this program is not for children! Programmed by Matt Bolish and Sarah Mankoff.

Lingerie Show
Laura Harrison, USA, 2015, HDCAM, 8m
Drug-addict Lorraine and her boyfriend Caesar are having a nightmarish 24 hours until Lorraine calls up her sister, CiCi, for help.

Hot Bod
Claire van Ryzin, USA, 2014, DCP, 4m
When a lonely man accidentally ingests a grow-your-own-girlfriend expandable water toy, he becomes extremely popular with the coolest dude in town.

Whole
William Reynish, Denmark, 2014, DCP, 12m
Danish with English subtitles
After a bad breakup leaves her heartbroken and depressed, Mira goes on a psychedelic trip in search of her spirit animal in order to feel whole again.

Denis the Pirate
Sam Messer, USA, 2015, DCP, 11m
A man tells the story of his great-great-great-great grandfather, Denis the Pirate, and his sidekick monkey, Babe Ruth, with whom he terrorized the Caribbean islands. World Premiere

Sanjay's Super Team
Sanjay Patel, USA, 2015, DCP, 7m
In the latest short from Pixar, modern superheroes and Hindu traditions clash in the daydreams of a young Indian boy. World Premiere

Palm Rot
Ryan Gillis, USA, 2014, DCP, 7m
While investigating a mysterious explosion deep in the Everglades, a crop duster’s discovery of a lone surviving crate sets off a series of unfortunate events.

Food
Siqi Song, USA, 2014, DCP, 4m
We are what we eat—from cheeseburgers to chocolate-covered pretzels—in this stop-motion documentary that explores how we choose the foods we consume.

A new addition to the New York Film Festival, this program showcases recent short-form work from some of the most exciting filmmakers living and working in New York today, an eclectic mix of familiar faces, established names, and unheralded ones to watch. Programmed by Florence Almozini and Dan Sullivan and sponsored by the City of New York Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment.

Hernia
Jason Giampietro, USA, 2015, DCP, 12m
Jason Giampietro’s latest hilarious short follows neurotic hypochondriac Rudy (Stephen Gurewitz), who is convinced he is suffering from a hernia, as he heads out into the night in search of sympathy from his friends, all of whom have lost their patience with him.

Riot
Nathan Silver, USA, 2015, DCP, 4m
The hyper-prolific Nathan Silver’s first documentary draws on his family’s home movies to revisit his directorial debut at the age of 9, as his efforts to dramatize the 1992 L.A. riots are undermined by an uncooperative cast and the intrusions of his mother. U.S. Premiere

Sundae
Sonya Goddy, USA, 2015, DCP, 7m
In this impeccable cringe comedy, an irritated mother drives around in an unfamiliar neighborhood bribing her taciturn 5-year-old son with ice cream in exchange for crucial information. World Premiere

Dragstrip
Pacho Velez & Daniel Claridge, USA, 2015, DCP, 4m
Comprised of images of racing aficionados—drivers, mechanics, and fans alike—in New Lebanon, NY, as they behold the sport they love, this film offers a rare opportunity to look at others in the act of observation, transforming the screen into a kind of ethnographic mirror. World Premiere

Special Features
James N. Kienitz Wilkins, USA, 2014, DCP, 10m
James N. Kienitz Wilkins’s funny and heady work of lo-fi sleight-of-hand centers on an interview between the filmmaker and a man describing a unique experience, but his entertaining reminiscence proves to be not at all what it seems.

Six Cents in the Pocket
Ricky D’Ambrose, USA, 2015, DCP, 14m
This hypnotic work of contemporary cinematic modernism—something like Robert Bresson in Park Slope, but not exactly—concerns a young man apartment-sitting for friends as talk of a plane crash ominously lingers in the air. World Premiere

Bad at Dancing
Joanna Arnow, USA, 2015, DCP, 11m
The Silver Bear winner at this year’s Berlinale comically chronicles the psychodrama and boundary-testing that arises between a needy young woman (Joanna Arnow) and her more confident roommate (Eleanore Pienta) when the latter gets a boyfriend (Keith Poulson).

My Last Film
Zia Anger, USA, 2015, DCP, 9m
An exhilarating whatsit and freewheeling black comedy, Anger’s latest takes aim at the independent film scenes in NY and LA with no-holds-barred ferocity, formal ingenuity, and an eyebrow-raising cast that includes Lola Kirke, Mac DeMarco, and Rosanna Arquette. World Premiere

Review
Dustin Guy Defa, USA, 2015, DCP, 4m
A young woman recounts a story to a group of friends who listen with rapt attention, but the tale sounds very familiar… Another masterful and clever work by one of the world’s premier shorts filmmakers. World Premiere.

New York, NY (August 27, 2015) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center, Film Comment magazine and Indiewire announced the eight finalists for the fourth annual New York Film Festival (NYFF) Critics Academy, a workshop for aspiring film critics that takes place before and during the festival (September 25– October 11). The program is designed to nurture promising film critics and journalists as they attend and cover screenings and events at this year’s festival.

For this year’s NYFF, the eight chosen participants - all based in the New York area - will have the opportunity to immerse themselves in a wide variety of international cinema while dealing with the practical challenges of covering a festival at the epicenter of New York’s film culture. The participants will cover the festival with reviews of films in the selection, articles on sidebar events, in-depth reflections on the various program sections, or interviews with the festival’s guests.

The 2015 NYFF Critics Academy will begin several days prior to the start of the festival with roundtable discussions continuing over the course of the following five days (participants will also have the option of attending press screenings earlier in the month). Participants will then work on covering the festival once it begins, with guidance from the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Deputy Director Eugene Hernandez and NYFF Critics Academy mentor Brian Brooks, Indiewire’s Deputy Editor and Chief Film Critic Eric Kohn, Film Comment magazine Senior Editor Nicolas Rapold, and Film Comment Digital Editor Violet Lucca. Their coverage will be published on Indiewire’s Criticwire blog and FilmComment.com. The workshop will officially conclude on October 11, the last day of the festival.

First launched as an initiative during the 2012 Locarno Film Festival, with a local version produced during the 2012 New York Film Festival, the combination of candid discussions with working critics and other members of the industry—paired with experience covering cinema in a deadline-driven environment—has proven to be the right kind of fuel for the professionally minded critic to begin sketching out a career plan.

The Critics Academy is one of two educational initiatives set to take place during NYFF, the other being the Artists Academy for young filmmakers. Just as that program guides filmmakers who show tremendous promise, the Critics Academy aims to provide context and pointers for critics who are already showing great potential in their writing, sensibilities, and professional motivation.

_______________________________

Last year a pal of mine met at another NYFF, Tim Wainwright, was a member, and I found out what an exciting and challenging experience this is. It's quite an honor (or elitist gesture?) since there are only eight. It might be nice if there were a few more, and members came from other parts of the country (or indeed the world), but this is a great program. The FSLC mentors realized at the last minute they had included no female members and added one; this year they've gotten ahead of the game and named three first off. Members attend the screenings, have round tables, meet with personalities of the FSLC and visiting filmmakers, and are given assignments, all designed to inspire and train them as future film critics. It's a good idea.

A glimpse of some fall releases with with historical or period themes, four of the seven included in the 2015 NYFF.

ROONEY MARA AND CATE BLANCHETT IN TODD HAYNES' CAROL

MY COMMENTS.
I'm reprinting this little preview of some potentially noteworthy fall US movies releases helpfully compiled for The New Yorker by the magaszine's all around movie writer and film blogger, Richard Brody. Three of these (highlighted in boldface) are 2015 NYFF selections-- Carol, admired at Cannes, a surprise to some that it didn't win the Palme d'Or; Bridge of Spies, another NYFF selection, a good mainstream bet for the Film Society given that Captain Philips, also starring Hanks and a 2013 NYFF featured big release, scored very high with mainstream critics, though I preferred Tobias Lindholm's similarly themed, more authentic and wider contexted A Hijacking. Almareyda's Experimenter, also in the NYFF, sounds very good to me; it has been spoken of as a cooler more inventive treatment of the kind of theme The Stanford Prison Experiment recently dealt with in a so-so fashion (but with interesting young actors). I don't know much about Brooklyn (the latter debuted at Sundance); the FSLC likes some New York-flavor in the festival, and it's a selection too. Zwick's Flight was featured in the 21012 NYFF; I liked Denzel's serious performance and its frank depiction of addiction. Not as impressed with it as a film, but it got decent reviews; but I'm dubious aboutPawn Sacrifice (not a NYFF selection) -- a tough subject with Tobey Maguire an odd choice for the lead. Trailers are playing in cineplexes. I have no crystal ball to tell me if the Brangelina vanity effort will be worth watching. Black Mass, which debuted at Venice, is up on cineplex posters, and it includes Benedict Cumbertatch as well as Johnny Depp. The latter of course played Dillinger in Michael Mannn's digitally glamorous Public Enemies in 2009.

I am looking forward to Experimenter too; but when all is said and done, Carol is still probably going to be the one out of all this batch you'll most want to run out and see. (I said I have no crystal ball, though.)

From The New Yorker 31 Aug. 2015.

MOVIESFALL PREVIEW
As the year’s prestigious releases roll in with an eye toward Oscar season, historical reconstructions—whether based on true stories or on classic fiction—will dominate screens. Carol [NYFF} (opening Nov. 20), directed by Todd Haynes, is set in 1952 New York. Rooney Mara plays a sales clerk who falls in love with a married woman (Cate Blanchett). It’s based on a novel, The Price of Salt, that Patricia Highsmith originally published under a pseudonym. Black Mass (Sept. 18) is a bio-pic about the Boston mobster Whitey Bulger (Johnny Depp), who, in the nineteen-seventies, became an informant for the F.B.I. Scott Cooper directed; Dakota Johnson co-stars.

Pawn Sacrifice (Sept. 18), directed by Edward Zwick, depicts the Cold War machinations behind the 1972 world-championship chess match between Brooklyn’s own Bobby Fischer (played by Tobey Maguire) and the reigning champion at the time, Boris Spassky (Liev Schreiber), of the Soviet Union. Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies] [NYFF] (Oct. 16), based on the so-called U-2 incident of 1960, tells the story of secret efforts to free the American pilot Francis Gary Powers from Soviet captivity. Tom Hanks plays James B. Donovan, the attorney who negotiated for his release; Amy Ryan plays the attorney’s wife, Mary McKenna Donovan; and Austin Stowell plays Powers. .

Brooklyn(Nov. 6), directed by John Crowley and adapted by Nick Hornby from a novel by Colm Tóibín, stars Saoirse Ronan as an Irish immigrant in New York in the nineteen-fifties. Michael Almereyda directed Experimenter (Oct. 16), a dramatization of a 1961 psychology experiment by Stanley Milgram (played by Peter Sarsgaard), in which subjects were induced to administer electric shocks to a designated victim. Angelina Jolie directed, wrote, and stars in By the Sea (Nov. 13), a drama set in France in the nineteen-seventies, about a couple—a retired dancer, played by Jolie, and a blocked writer, played by Brad Pitt—who are struggling to save their marriage.
--Richard Brody in The New Yorker, 31 Aug. 2015.